Vaudine England – Getting a small box of books out of the cargo office at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport was how one friend learned about corruption in Indonesia.

As soon as she got out of her taxi near the warehouse, the touts arrived, waving cardboard folders that carried all the documents she required, insisting she pay for their help.

But this foreign friend was stubborn – and naive. She was determined to pick up what was rightfully hers for no charge whatsoever.

Three hours later, this woman had compiled her own cardboard folder, trudging from one small window to the next in a bewildering array of offices strung out across the manicured lawns. At last she was ready for the final, crucial signature.

This last office was no mere window, she recalls. It was an air-conditioned room, where an official had time to flip through a Playboy magazine. He signed the form, and the woman was smug enough to ask how much the process would have cost, had she played the game. When told about HK$300 she smiled and boasted, "Well, I haven't paid anything!"

Unmoved, the official remarked: "Yes, but you are very tired, aren't you?" He was right. She had her box, but for a one-off payment she could have delegated the entire stressful episode – and kept a dozen Indonesians happy.

What she did not know then was that the seemingly endless web of payoffs and gratuities is a highly sophisticated, pragmatic system through which several local families could have had more on their table to eat that night. She had preserved her luxury of moral superiority but she had only won a battle to lose the war.

The example is one of a countless number that anyone dealing with Indonesia has experienced. Corruption is the easiest crime to spotlight, yet the hardest virus in a society to kill. It provokes mass generalisations and prejudice. As it seeps into the highest levels of government and business, it produces suburbs of vast mansions adorned with every luxury alongside the hovels of the dispossessed.

Is it just that Indonesians are somehow weak or greedy enough to choose corruption over honesty every time?

The clarion call of the resurgent opposition, "Reformasi!", would suggest otherwise, and the reverberating demands for a fresh start led by a clean and trusted administration have such momentum now as to seem impossible to be denied.

In every political or social forum these days, discussions invariably turn to corruption and the need to eradicate it. President Bacharuddin Habibie must be seen to be tackling high-profile corruption cases to keep even a modicum of faith in his government. Front-runner for the presidency, Megawati Sukarnoputri, sees her first task as that of establishing a society of just law and fair redress.

The rallying cry against KKN – Korupsi, Kolusi and Nepotisme – is shared by all the "little people" across the nation who have had their lands and livelihoods stolen, their children denied education, their careers blocked and even their lives threatened – all for lack of the right monetary obeisance to the right official at the right time.

Indonesians are now holding their highest institutions to account. They want to prosecute former president Suharto, the Attorney-General Andi Ghalib, every crony who ever did business with "the family" (of Mr Suharto), and the managers of banks who loaned themselves money which did not exist.

Private businessmen and politicians now secretly help Teten Masduki of the pioneering group, Indonesian Corruption Watch, to get confidential documents to help expose and prosecute the most blatant examples of robbing the poor to pay the rich. Even the World Bank – which long turned a blind eye to the state secretariat's siphoning-off of huge sums on every loan – now speaks of corruption on a daily basis.

There is indeed much to talk about. A list of recent travesties would have to start with the tens of billions of dollars allegedly accumulated by Mr Suharto during his reign, a process no different to daylight robbery.

Mr Suharto's children could send their minders out to search for a "commission" on a new project or deal or simply demand bags full of cash. Lest we forget, foreign diplomats, business people and non-government organisations have all played the game and paid.

Laws to protect the citizenry or allow for redress, where they exist, rarely work. One former high court judge freely admits there is not a single honest judge in the country.

Whenever a case begins, it is the lawyers' job to race into the judge's office to buy him before the other side does, and to pay off local journalists so that the case is reported in a certain way. Officials all the way up the line to the highest judicial offices must be bribed to give citizens access to what, in a free society, would be theirs by right. This is a society where the state oil firm, Pertamina, could blithely lose at least US$10 billion in state funds in the late 1970s and its then boss be rewarded with a chunk of prime real estate and a job running a major charity. Just weeks ago, an independent audit found the firm had managed to lose another US$6.1 billion – and still no heads have rolled.

The latest, most blatant case appears to be that of Attorney-General Mr Ghalib, whose bank accounts allegedly hold almost US$2 million in unaccounted funds, some of it received from two businessmen his office was investigating. The military police investigating the crime have now closed the case citing a lack of evidence, and Teten Masduki who initiated the case faces attempts to discredit and pressure him.

"Corruption is rampant in Indonesia, particularly among law enforcers, because there is lawlessness in Indonesia and there is no sufficient sanction to instil fear for them not to commit crime," attorney Frans Winarta said.

Every step of the way – to getting a passport or a driver's licence, securing a title to land one has lived on for decades, or simply getting from one part of town to another – can involve payments to policemen, secretaries, civil servants and lawyers.

Yet at its pettiest level, corruption is another word for mutual help. With so little opportunity for honest advancement, and surrounded by millions of people all struggling to survive, a drop of a few hundred rupiah here or there can mean being able to eat chicken for dinner or getting the sick child to see a doctor.

There is barely a functioning social security net, so those who are a little richer than others can see these bribes as oil that soothes the hardship of life in a developing country.

But for corruption on the scale with which Indonesia can impress, some other explanation is called for, and the answer to why it persists across all levels of the society highlights just how potent a political message of anti-corruption can be.

Take the case of army corruption. Mr Suharto can again provide the example: when he was in charge of the central Javanese Diponegoro Command, back in the 1950s, all regional commands knew they had to fend for themselves, finding food and material as best they could.

Naturally, deals were made with local traders, and Mr Suharto was no exception. He just happened to find astute partners in a younger Liem Sioe Liong and Bob Hasan, and almost lost his career for stretching the limits of financial practice.

His partners then became his cronies later, central to the edifice of state-sanctioned corruption which became the hallmark of Mr Suharto's New Order rule.

Indonesian intellectual, Mochtar Buchori, says one must go back decades, even centuries, to explain why corruption has become the norm.

He believes that Java – traditional seat of power in Indonesia – reacted to foreign incursions and the collapse of its kingdoms by turning in on itself, obsessing on trivialities and decoration.

"From 1755 to 1908, Java had cultural involution," he said. "Only when the 1908 [early nationalist] generation came along, was there a beginning to putting an end to the decadence of Javanese culture."

The clash of feudalism with colonialism was not, to Mr Buchori, the only root of today's corruption. He pinpoints the Japanese occupation during World War II as the start of the rot.

"To live on the basis of theft was still stigmatic in colonial times," he said. "But changes began during the occupation, when we were robbed of everything we had. People began to lose faith, values were turned upside down for the sake of pure survival.

"The problem of corruption is also intimately related to the idea of a work ethos – the idea that you do your best to earn your way, and that you should not get perks for free."

But any equation between hard work and just reward has long been lost in Indonesia, making any fresh accounting of worth and values very difficult to achieve. History shows that when nationalist soldiers were fighting for their nation in the 1940s and had to feed and clothe themselves for lack of a central government to pay them, stealing from and cheating the people they sought to protect was commonplace.

Once independence was gained, these same men were acclaimed heroes and it was hardly the time in which to start punishing those who had broken the rules.

These same men were then given the large companies and concessions left behind by the Dutch, without training or management skills, so that subsequent travesties should hardly be cause for shock. A culture of complicity, supported by a docile press and a compliant judiciary, set the scene for the rapacity of the New Order.

The philosopher and Catholic priest, Father Franz Magnis-Suseno, believes that corruption was not yet a major issue in the 1950s. "It began in the 1960s and climaxed up until now," he said.

"In the New Order, it was huge, dealing with huge amounts and insatiable appetites. Those who were already immensely rich, still they wanted more.

"Under the New Order government, the whole political culture was steeped in Javanism, so that Javanese political culture provided the ways and legitimation of corruption, and now there is an anti-Java backlash. But Javanism is not the root cause."

The source of corruption, believes Father Magnis-Suseno, is authoritarianism. Any government operating without checks and balances can indeed get away with murder in pursuit of private gain.

"You find big corruption in closed communist societies, you saw it under the Nazi regime – the common denominator is a closed political system," he said.

Now it is no secret that even to become a civil servant takes the placement of bribes in the right hands. Once behind one of those strangely empty desks in a ministry, the junior bureaucrat's salary is so low that it effectively only covers attendance at the office. It does not, in itself, warrant getting up and doing something. For that, more money is required.

A life relatively free of corruption requires a society in which a judicial system exists independently of government's legislative or parliamentary functions, and which can therefore rule freely against the powers that be when necessary.

It also requires a consensus on what constitutes fairness, on the idea that individuals have rights by virtue of being citizens of the country, without needing to pay to prove it.